DYING FOR IT - Almeida Theatre

Nikolai Erdman
A letter from Stalin to
Stanislavsky:
November 9th 1931
Most Respected Konstantin
Sergeyevich!
Image courtesy of Ria Novosti/ Lebrecht
I do not have a very high opinion
of the play The Suicide. My close
comrades see it as empty and
even harmful… However I do not
object to giving the theatre the
chance to try it out and show its
work. It may be that the theatre
is able to achieve its aim. …My
comrades who are more
knowledgeable about art will be
the arbitrators in this matter. I
am an amateur in such things.
Greetings!
J Stalin
In 1931 the artistic director of the
Moscow Arts Theatre Konstantin
Stanislavsky, supported by Maxim
Gorky, wrote directly to Stalin to
defend Nikolai Erdman’s second play
The Suicide, and to ask that the ban
imposed on the play a year previously
be overturned. Such defence was by
now common in the artistic world, and
indeed necessary: Stalin was
consolidating his power in the Soviet
Union and by the beginning of the
1930s state control over the arts was
on the increase, and censorship was a
common component of literary life.
The future of a writer like Erdman,
described as a satirist, whose work
was perceived by the state to defend
the bourgeoisie, was not promising.
Despite granting the Arts Theatre
permission to work on the play,
Stalin’s rather unenthusiastic
Nikolai Erdman in 1950
responses to both Stanislavsky and
Gorky, (to whom he reportedly said
that he found Erdman ‘rather petty,
rather shallow’) foreshadowed the
play’s fate in the Soviet Union, where it
was eventually staged successfully for
the first time in 1987- seventeen years
after Erdman’s death. Despite the
support of several Moscow
luminaries, and like many of his
contemporaries, he was arrested and
exiled fairly shortly after writing The
Suicide and forced to step out of the
Moscow theatrical limelight into
literary obscurity. It was only relatively
recently that his plays were revived in
Russia, and that he was rediscovered
as one of the country’s most popular
playwrights.
Nikolai Erdman was born in
November 1900 in Moscow, the son of
an accountant of Baltic German
descent. He began writing at the age
of nine, and his first poetry was
published in 1919, in the journal Life
and Art of Russian Youth. As a teenager
he associated with the Imagist poets
led by Sergei Esenin, before leaving
Moscow to serve time in the Red
Army. On his return he was drawn to
the theatre collective, writing librettos
for opera and ballet, skits and cabaret
sketches for small theatres and musichall,
establishing his reputation in
theatre. He co-wrote the revue
Moscow from a Point of View with
Vladimir Mass which opened at the
Theatre of Satire in1924. Moscow
theatres were hungry for new work and
Erdman was regarded as an innovative
and experimental dramatist. The poet
Mayakovsky later begged Erdman to
teach him to write plays, a huge
accolade from someone who was an
early and major influence on his
poetry.
With the success of The Mandate
which opened at the Meyerhold
theatre in 1925 Erdman’s fame was
secure. He began work on his new
play, The Suicide, completing it in
1930, only for the ban to be imposed
after an official reading at the
Vakhtangov theatre in September of
that year. In a transcript of the
committee meeting it reads ‘…these
thoughts and expressions are just food for
the bourgeoisie, who will watch this play
with pleasure and laugh at it.’
However in response to Stalin’s letter